My starting point is Jöns Jacob Berzelius, prominent chemist as well as founder, editor, and reformer of a number of scientific periodicals. In his roles as editor, he corresponded extensively with editors of other journals, he gained access to these journals, and he made his views on chemical and editorial practices known through his own publications. In his position as Permanent Secretary, he reformed the publications of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and launched several new periodicals.
These periodicals were currency in a rapidly expanding system of exchange, where scientific societies, academies, universities, and libraries expanded their collections as well as their influence through the exchange of publications. Formalised networks, such as the Marburg Akademischer Tauschverein (1817), established their own rates and rules; but institutions also engaged in exchanges according to their academic status or that of their editors.
The scientific status of Berzelius was crucial to the influence of the journals he founded, edited, and contributed to. They, in their turn, were of vital importance in establishing – or re-establishing – the Academy of Sciences as a notable player in a diversifying institutional scientific landscape, where knowledge circulated according to emerging hierarchies and power relationships.
Studying the changes in exchange practices during the 19th century highlights the practical conditions for the circulation of scientific knowledge, and the fundamental importance of exchange networks in the moral, as well as monetary, economy of science.
